KATHLEEN ANDERSON

Lessshame Voyage

When you read the word 'voyage', there is in it the inherent suggestion of expedition, exploration, strange and new encounters, perhaps a conquest or two. Its use in the title of Kathleen Anderson's one-woman show at Hampden Gallery is deliberate in every way. A voyage, after-all, is not a day trip punctuated by a stop at a New England sugar shack. A voyage is not a weekend at the shore requiring a tote for sunglasses and a thick paperback. A voyage is not even a few weeks in Europe accompanied by Samsonite filled with day and evening attire. No. A voyage is something grand and memorable. A voyage opens up new territory, stakes claims, changes those encountered along the way. A voyage must be planned for with great care and when the great planning goes awry, then great improvisation must take its place. Voyaging implies the travel from one place to another – one often distant and unknown.

And so it is with North Carolina based artist Kathleen Anderson’s “Lessshame Voyage “( that is - one where the "less" and the "shame" join together creating new terminology and new terms). In “Lessshame Voyage” Anderson lays out the acquisitions of a lifetime's voyage - one filled with travels and travails, the accumulations of home and children, the nature of locations here, there, and everywhere. Anderson’s experiences are woven into the lines of her drawings, embedded in layers of her Xeroxed images that stake her claim to complex territory.

Throughout the exhibition, paintings with surfaces built up and sanded down, scratched into and written over map out Anderson’s idiosyncratic voyage.

The “Lessshame Voyage” is an exhibition of prints, drawings, paintings and objects that clearly shows that the lived experience is where Anderson gleans the content for her charged works. Kathleen Anderson has earned a BFA from the University of Maine and an MFA (93) from the University of Massachusetts. She has exhibited her work throughout the U.S. and has taught at the University of Massachusetts and Cape Fear Community College in NC. HAMPDEN GALLERY November 1 – December 1, 2004